I was doing some last minute Christmas shopping yesterday on Chiswick high road. There are quite a few greengrocers stalls which, for the festive season, sell the usual range of Christmas greenery: christmas trees, wreaths, poincettias, and the like. They all sell exactly the same gear. I imagine that’s because they all are supplied by the same company.

Naturally the bawling grocers appeal to the punters’ Christmas spirit to part with their cash. One stall had enormous sacks of spuds with placard announcing: “Christmas day, boxing day, new year’s eve: Sorted!”. I quite liked that.

One stall was selling cyclamens, which are one of my favourite flowers it so happens. However, I think this particular trader hadn’t really grasped the whole seasonal marketing strategy thing…

Merry Christmas everyone!

What’s this then?

I shall spare you an excruciatingly protracted pop quiz. Checkout the big daddy in the room…

Yep, of course you guessed it: the famous, full-scale model of a blue whale at the Natural History Museum in South Kensington. I still remember the first time I saw it when I was a kid. I was staggered by the scale of the animal, it being thirty metres long and me being only the size of a pint. I remember wondering if this marvel was a real animal. Well it is just a model, young Tom. You fool.

Our spontaneous jaunt to the NHM was a way of constructively filling a Sunday evening. Relaxing and productive we thought. But it was a faintly weird (though highly enjoyable) experience. For starters, I don’t think I have been there since my school days. Secondly, I think that a lot of it has not changed since then.

The board of the museum surely had a meeting in the mid eighties where they decided that informational exhibits were too stuffy and unappealing to kids. They must have decided that the only thing to do was to jazz them up with buttons and  cutting-edge information technology. Which is to say lots of little lights and printed plastic. They don’t seem to have had another of those upgrade meetings since.

I think it is a great idea making displays interactive and fun for kids, but they might have been pushing it a bit on occasions:

I would love to know the thought process of the curator who mocked this little Damien Hirst up. “We need a display about rhino horns for kids > What sort of horns are kids usually interested in? > The sort that goths stick on their heads before going out to rebel”. Ughhh.

Of course most of the kids will run straight to the big animatronic T. Rex which has been displayed with much dramatic effect. You have to go there to see what I mean. The skulls and skeletons are pretty cool too.

I found this particular display enlightening. It shows the proportion of air in the lungs which is renewed in a single breath by a human (left) and a whale (right). I can really see the point of all those Yoga exercises where you try force as much stale air out of your lungs as possible.

The strange thing about this admirable museum is that it is supposed to teach you about the wonders of nature (and it does) but the place has a curiously stale, fusty air about it. There are sections you walk through which feel like administrative corridors of a university (I quite liked that actually – it made it feel nicely academic); a lot of the displays, as aforementioned, need updating; but, most of all, it is filled with plastic and stuffed animals many of which have been there since the earlier part of the 20th century (including the big fatty blue whale which I so love).  I mean, is this not a curious sight?:

As I walked around the stuffed elephants and yaks, I could not help but think these taxidermic specimens just a little bit inappropriate for the cause of conservation. Perhaps the airfix blue whale sums up the place quite well: big, out-of-date, a bit dusty, weird, fascinating, loveable.

It was nice to see that the kids were just as fascinated with the buttons and lights as I was when I was a youth. And like young Tom they were only interested in triggering the flashes and sound effects, not the informative captions about baleen and spermacita. Subjects which I find fascinating now of course.

In this blog I have written a fair amount on the way we eat. To summarise my thinking so far: I think that food is all about connection. It is about connecting with the people with whom we eat it; the community from which we purchase it; the farming economies that produce it; the animals that become it; and our own bodies which sensually, nutritionally, and spiritually benefit from it. Food is not only the fuel of human life. It is the medium through which we learn about and express ourselves.

I am not waxing lyrical here. I genuinely believe in ascribing such importance to food, as you may have guessed if you have read my other food posts (ignore the bit about the monkey-brain dip). Allow me to elaborate.

When a friend cooks you a meal, it is hard not to feel cared for in even a small way. It shows that someone has taken the time and trouble to nourish you and to create a nice evening which can be shared enjoying each other’s company.

The movement away from local shops to supermarkets, though it is a cliché to say, is excoriating communities. We are losing contact with the supply source, with accountability for products, with the traditional skills and knowledge of butchers and fishmongers, with the simple joy of friendly, no-strings banter over a cauliflower and a bunch of carrots. Ironically, by being in the larger consumer space of a supermarket we are more separated from each other than ever. Usually the first words spoken to us in a supermarket shopping trip are ‘how would you like to pay?’.

As we ignore the ‘country of origin’ labels on the products, and collectively empower supermarkets with massive bargaining power, farmers’ businesses become dictated to them by supermarket buyers. This has a direct effect on the way our land is farmed: the quality of produce; the intensiveness of the methods involved; the range of foods we are presented with; and the quality of life of people working in the industry.

We ignore the information available to us about the standards of life afforded to the animals we are going to eat and just search for the cheapest, most prettily packaged meat. The result is the commodification of animal life. We close our eyes to the suffering, despite all the lessons from history which we ignore at our peril. Dioxin contamination, foot and mouth, BSE, salmonella and the rest are not blips in farming quality. They are a growing trend. The resources used by intensive meat farming in terms of grain, water, and energy are so great that many people find it immoral to eat meat at all. But if we insist on free-range, non-intensive farming and let go of our relentless hunger for cheap, poor quality meat with every meal then I think meat eating would no longer be such a strain on the environment. It is not the animals but the factories we lock them in which cause the problem.

From infancy we learn to ignore the needs of our bodies. We should be learning to listen. We dull our taste buds and senses with artificially flavoured, coloured, fatty, sweet food. We cherish the notion of eating like fois-gras geese until we feel stuffed. Does the amount of food on our plates always coincide with the exact amount we need? The metabolism is an amazingly evolved tool, being capable of taking advantage of a rare glut of fat and sugar, storing it efficiently. But of course now we have no shortage of these commodities. The result is obesity, and a palette which yearns for ketchup with everything. Fast food is not just convenient- you can buy a healthy meal just as quickly and easily. It is about delivering our bodies a quick hit of fat and sugar and perpetuating a diet of short-lived satisfaction. Through educating our palettes and senses, and by cooking our own food rather than buying factory prepared crap we get a feel for the nature of our food and the needs of our bodies.

Right, I’m off for a kebab.

For a long, long, long time the photo page of my website has been fairly unrepresentative of where I am at with my photography. It has had a selection of my low-fi abstract pictures I took when started getting into photography about six years ago.

But, after a ridiculous hiatus, I have finally got round to revamping the page with Flash and a new selection of pictures. You can check out the new page at:   http://tomrowland.co.uk/photos/index.html

It should be easier to keep updated now too. Comments, criticism, and suggestions all welcome of course!

Just in case the title of this post scares people off I should quickly state the following: I am not a vegetarian, nor is this blog post about to try to convince its dear readers to become vegetarian. I am a lover of food: if I were a Roman I would pray to Edesia, the goddess of feasting; if I were on death row, I would spend ten long years meticulously planning the perfect final meal to the dismay of the Texas prison authorities; if I were a part of the body I would be the tongue; if I had a coat of arms it would carry the emblems of a big fat pie, some chop sticks and a morel; if I worked for Chanel, I would launch a his/hers fragrance called Eau de Tartufe, black truffles for men, white for women. Bloody hell I am starting to sound like Rudyard Kipling. Whom, incidentally, I would eat first if I were a cannibal.*

But despite my overwhelming commitment to fine dining, I am not a hedonist. That is to say, I think that ethical values come before aesthetics. Perhaps they are interrelated but hey let’s not get bogged down just yet. The overwhelming majority of people directly use animals for food, as companions, or clothing, indirectly via vivisection-tested medicines, and so on. But very few of us spend as much effort looking into the treatment of those animals as we do looking up the Jamie Oliver recipe for Eazy-Peazy Bangaz and MASH with a Lahvely red-woin Jooo.

Now I would not suggest that it is the duty of the moral, civilized human being to launch their own exhaustive fact-finding mission into animal welfare. But there are a few questions you can ask yourself. For example:

• Do you think that an animal, even if you believe it to be a lower order of consciousness, deserves the right to live a life free from unnecessary suffering?
• Do animals have the right to live a life beyond that of a mere commodity, even if their bodies end up being used as such?
• Does mankind have an automatic right to use other species simply because it is more powerful? Is might really right?
• If you think you do not care one way or the other or you would rather not know, does deliberate ignorance (of any subject) mean you cannot call yourself a good person?

Different people will answer in different ways of course. Vegans believe that mankind’s relationship with animals should not reflect one of mastery in any way, and as a result they will not use animals for food, clothing, entertainment, companionship etc. This view is based upon a belief in an existential equivalence of all animals. However, this is something that many people will find hard to accept. Perhaps some don’t want to face difficult questions about pain or consciousness. But some vegans controversially draw a parallel between society’s use of animals and the Nazis’ attitude towards the Jews: “they are a lower order of life, so we can do what we please with them, and not feel bad about it”.  I would advise any vegans reading this to be EXTREMELY careful where they make this argument because if misconstrued it could cause some people to be not just angry but very upset indeed. On a curious side note, the Nazis brought in  laws banning vivisection and protecting animal welfare, apparently as an attack on what they deemed to be Jewish sciences and Kosher slaughtering methods. Although Hitler did not seem to take much notice when he trialled poison gas on his dogs..

I have a real respect for vegans. I personally think there are logical difficulties with being only an ethical vegetarian: what is the difference  between eating meat and wearing leather, or eating battery-chicken eggs? If you are going to make an ethical point, you have to be consistent. But I truly abhor the dismissive usage of vegetarians and vegans in the media. You see Clarkson and Ramsey laughing about them as though they are idiots. A claim no-one would ever level at those two of course. Isn’t there enough complacency in our society already before we criticise others for living their lives in a way which seems right to them?

My own personal view is that animals are conscious, feel emotions, and have their own unique perspectives on the world formulated from their different senses and experiences from humans. But I cannot extend to them a recognition of the same order of intelligence as humans. If you did then would you not have to expect them to act morally responsibly as befits their intelligence? An animal would be culpable for theft, murder, rape and all of the other things which make up the bloody daily workings of nature. This would be patently ridiculous, and a somewhat awkward drain on police resources and the judicial system. Not to mention prison overcrowding. Anyway… I cannot see the absolute difference between a human killing an animal for its ends and a lion, killer whale, spider, dog, cat, skylark, or jabberwocky doing the same. Death is part of life, and I can accept that. If you cannot then you should not.